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Game Systems analyst ricklessabandon shared a list of tentative changes to Katarina on Twitter. Also, Lead Champion Designer Meddler held a Q&A together with Xypherous, talking about the balance of certain mid mages, the state of Gangplank’s reworkÂ and how crit damage on ADC items can be tuned. That plus a sweet conceptual kit for Nautilus.

We sure can. 🙂 There are actually already some changes in place to discourage dodgers, but they aren’t testable on the PBE environment, which is why I didn’t detail them above. As many people have brought up dodging in Nemesis Draft though, let’s get into them right now.

1) Dramatically increased dodge penalties of up to 2 hours for recurring dodges. We can also change these numbers on the fly once live, and we’ll be keeping an eye on them. As many players here have pointed out, Nemesis Draft is an opt-in experience, so there should be no surprises in champ select.

2) In the spirit of rewarding good behaviour, we also have a special reward icon plannedfor players who don’t leave or dodge any games of Nemesis Draft throughout the mode’s run. There will be a low minimum game requirement, but the goal is to give players who loved Nemesis Draft a badge of honour to display afterwards. This reward will be delivered after the game mode has ended.

For anyone curious on the detection of AFKs, leaving, etc, this recent LeaverBuster FAQ has all the details.

Anyone want to talk about LoL, game design, how we make champions etc? Going to be around for a couple of hours and looking forward to chatting with some of you folks.

To give you a quick bit of background I’ve been at Riot for about three years now. I’ve previously worked on Ziggs, Varus, Syndra, Lissandra, Elise and Gnar. A lot of my time these days is spent looking at the year ahead, working with other Rioters to figure out what sort of champions we want to make, what our goals are etc.

Edit: Xypherous, from the Systems Team that handles stuff like the Preseason changes, is also going to drop by to chat. If you’ve got questions about that sort of stuff should definitely throw them in too! He also worked on Nautilus, Lulu, Orianna, Fizz and Renekton before that as well, so if you’ve got questions about them he’s the guy to hit up.

Edit 2: Thanks for the chat all, I need to head off and grab food. Will drop back later tonight though and add in a few more replies.

There aren’t any champions I don’t think should be in the game at all, I think they’ve all got a solid core to them. In some cases though that’s not very well executed on though. Urgot and Yorick for example have cool underlying ideas (undead cyborg war machine and gravedigger with pet ghouls) that aren’t well realized.

I’m totally responsible for Fizz’s ‘E’ – and the intent was to make a frustrating skill that conveyed that aspect of Fizz’s personality. I think my goal was something like ‘Let’s aim for something that feels like Shaco in terms of trickery/frustration without going too far.’ In retrospect – it’s probably worked too well in a lot of regards with that.

The idea for Fizz’s ‘E’ was primarily to allow him to evade opposing damage without actually being durable – so that every now and then his opponents can choke Fizz and obliterate him and feel good about that.

Fizz was really meant to be a character that felt slippery enough so that you experience a moment of catharsis when you finally catch the jerk and annihilate him.

As to lane functionality, it was meant much more for the ‘lower the poke he takes’ rather than the ‘instantly annihilate you with Q’ that it’s become. In hindsight, I wish there was way more incentive to stay on the pole rather than instantly double-tap to move faster.

I don’t work on live balance directly these days, but the incentives to staying on the pole (and perhaps less damage on the double jump part of it) are generally good directions I think. I’d also love to trim Mana costs from his other abilities and shove it even more into the ‘E’ to punish spamming it recklessly like you’ve pointed out.

However, again, don’t work on balancing directly. There’s a bunch of super smart live designers whose job it is to make sure things look okay from a competitive angle.

What we’re currently looking at (note this is experimental, so could well change tomorrow) is slightly lower resistances on Molten Shield, with Tibbers also getting the resistance bonuses as well plus a brief movement speed boost. One of the big goals there, in addition to balance changes, is to make casting Molten Shield a bit more interesting and add a bit of extra depth to how you micro Tibbers.

For the short term, there’s a wide range of ADC itemization paths depending on the ADC. However, there is little variation on the items that an individual ADC buys.

There isn’t a whole lot of range on a specific ADC for the items they can buy – but at least they’re buying different things (I see 3 or 4 main builds that vary across type – and then there’s Hurricane on Kalista – so there’s variance across ADCs but not in an ADC.)

That’s in an okay spot for now – but in an ideal world lots of things would be different in terms of reactive purchases and such but I think the other classes’ itemization deserve a touch up before we delve back into ADCs.

For an example of more long term stuff – critical strike is eventually going to have to be looked at to prevent AA based carries from forever being the norm, for example – but that exploration will take a while.

We could fork Essence Reaver off Brutalizer – and the item would be immensely more popular and bought more – you’re absolutely right on that.

Unfortunately, making Essence Reaver’s build path and build up good is something that would most likely send a certain class of AD assassins (whose gates are early/mid-game Mana) into somewhat crazy levels. Pantheon/Talon, etc – would get the lion’s share of benefit until ER was nerfed to be suitable for them.

Ultimately, ER will always kind of be bad until Assassin’s have their own itemization and have their inherent power reduced.

The weird part about items is always that we can always make an item good or powerful – but making that item good and powerful on the people we want it on and not cause side effects elsewhere is the tricky bit.

Something we’ve been aiming for is to get a greater variety of appearances/tones for champions of both genders. There were a couple of years there where many of our female champions especially ended up looking pretty similar and we’ve been making an effort to try and avoid that. That’s not to say we won’t continue to make attractive champions, male and female, where appropriate for their character, but that we also want a wide range that includes champs like Kalista and Rek’Sai as well.

I can’t speak with personal experience about the intent around the game’s initial release, that was well before my time at Riot. Certainly there seems to be a lot of support internally for the greater variety we’ve been exploring recently though.

The intent with Varus was to make a champion with strong poke, a lot of utility by ADC standards and reasonable auto attack damage, in exchange for low burst and mobility. Fitting into the gap between Ashe at one end of the immobile spectrum (heaps of utility, lowest ADC damage) and Kog’maw at the other end (heaps of damage and poke).

Been thinking recently we might want to strengthen his poke a bit (possibly by tying his passive into more than just his auto attacks). Haven’t had a chance to bounce any thoughts about that off the live balance team yet though, see what their current thinking is.

A ton of moves were scrapped in the making of him – he started out as being very light in CC because he had the hook but… yeah.

Off the top of my head, here’s the things I remember trying:

A punch which knocked back anyone but the primary target (Xin Zhao’s current ult).

Passive X-Ray eyes that could see through walls in a cone.Cage of Pain, which brought up a giant circular shock/slow ‘fence’ – like a super big wall of pain.Bullrush, where you got MS and flung anyone you moved through (multiple times, charging bull kind of deal)Throw – where you impaled someone on the anchor and then flung them and the anchor to a point of your choice‘Enrage’ when a nearby ally got attacked (yeah…)

I tend to cycle through skills a lot – I’m sure there was more that I can’t remember. I just remember a long phase of Nautilus being ‘A bull who sets up cages that he then chases people in.’

“Bullrush, where you got MS and flung anyone you moved through (multiple times, charging bull kind of deal)”

Man, that was a memorable playtest. I recall one team fight near dragon, where Naut ulted and ran back and forth, juggling 3-4 of us in the air for about 5 seconds until we all died. I still wake up screaming occasionally…

Took a little while to hit upon the Q as the foundation of the kit, though then felt obvious in retrospect since her original concept art featured her spheres so prominently. Once the basic idea of ‘Q generates objects, other spells manipulate them’ came together things were relatively smooth.

The intent with her ult was to give her a reliable tool (given her other abilities were all skillshots) and allow her to punish someone caught out of position or diving into her team (theory being that as a non mobile mage she’d have limited target selection). Ended up being a bit more of a ‘burst down a key target after stunning them’ ability than originally intended. It’s counterplay’s a bit lower than I’d like in that regard, though having said that champs do often need tools like that if they’re to compete with other highly mobile options.

They’re two different teams. We both have a strong focus on the state of the live game but systems tends to take a longer view on game flow and game health while Balance tends to look at the immediate things affecting champions.

For example, systems might think about whether or not we want more or less snowballing in the game and adjust things like jungle gold or laner experience to accommodate while Live might look at a specific champion and whether or not he should be changed in the upcoming patch because he’s too snowbally.

That stuff can be hard to demonstrate on a Resume sometimes, past work/study, pet projects, gaming background, written design tests etc come together to give a fairly good initial read on applicants though.

Bit early to say much alas. We had a crack at a GP rework last year that had some interesting stuff in it, but didn’t quite hit the mark so didn’t get shipped (or talked about after a while, our bad, we should have mentioned it was a project that had been put on hold). We’re going to give him another look this year, wouldn’t expect anything for a while though, a number of other reworks will come out beforehand that are further along already.

Ghostcrawlershared the balance team’s thoughts on Tristana and that she’s in need in nerfs that won’t be at Worlds, for fear of changing the game environmentÂ unnecessarily for training teams. He also addressed Soraka‘s healer-focused rework, ADC itemization and the age-old topic of Ranged vs Melee. Soraka was also within scope of today’s red posts on the community beta forums, along with Sona and her state post-rework. Lastly, Meddler confirmed Sion won’t be receiving band-aid changes before his rework and an announcement that the in-client store will soon be revamped.

Yeah, she needs nerfing. Realistically it is unlikely to happen before worlds. We like for those matches to take place on as stable a build as possible that has been thoroughly tested, so even very good changes can be ultimately risky. We also think it’s reasonable for the players to expect that numbers won’t go changing wildly right in the middle of worlds.

To clarify, she needs some sort of weakness. If we just lower her damage or something, players may just switch from her to Kog or someone which just substitutes one dominant ADC for another. Ideally we’d like to give her some trade-offs so that you can choose her for her strengths or avoid her because of her weaknesses.

I said: To clarify, she needs some sort of weakness. If we just lower her damage or something, players may just switch from her to Kog or someone which just substitutes one dominant ADC for another. Ideally we’d like to give her some trade-offs so that you can choose her for her strengths or avoid her because of her weaknesses.

You said: Remember when you said the whack a mole strategy was something you were trying to steer away from? Yet you just keep doing it.Â

You get the same outcome whether you add or subtract numbers. You’re just deciding if the number 20 or the number 25 is the target and adjusting all the others to reach it. The same risks apply because if you accidentally get Trist at 26 and Ashe at 23, then players still understandable choose Trist over Ashe. In fact, bringing all the others up is actually more risky — in other words, it’s easier to nerf than buff — because the more numbers you touch, the more the likelihood that you will change something in a way you didn’t anticipate.

A better solution, we believe, is making sure champions have niches — that they have strengths and weaknesses. To use the same example, rather than asking whether you’d play the champion at power level 20 or power level 25, you’re choosing among the number 20, the letter B or the color green. It’s easiest to see this in supports where choosing Thresh vs. Braum vs. Nami gives you different strengths for different trade-offsÂ andÂ also causes the rest of your team and the other team to approach things differently. We want to make sure fighters and marksmen (who typically have the least well-defined niches) feel the same way. Does that explanation make sense?

There is some value in players not having to remember two versions of the game (live vs. LCS) because it’s confusing, but overall we agree that there isn’t much point in holding back good changes from live. My point was that we are unlikely to see changes in worlds themselves. You might see them on live. (We do know that a lot of players do gravitate towards whatever the pros are using, even if the builds are different.)

I agree. They already have the advantage of range. They don’t also need excellent movement, survivability and tons of CC. I feel like we often slapped those mechanics on abilities just to give the ability a little oomph, not because the ADCs really needed to be more slippery. Part of the intent is that in a team fight you need to cooperate as a team to keep them alive.

Well to be fair, a lot of champions do lack weaknesses. But we’re pretty happy with Lucian, Vayne and Kog for example. Even if they start to feel over or underpowered we feel like we have dials we can turn there. If we nerf Trist’s damage right now, she probably just goes away as a viable pick. For example, she used to be weaker mid game where she needed a few more items to become really scary. Now she can get like 1-2 and be good to go. She also used to be weaker in lane, but we toned down Lucian’s lane bullying. Without explicitly intending to, we removed her downsides.

I don’t know what specific changes we would make to her. I leave that up to the live team. I’m just presenting the problem.

True, but we did recently update Sona and Soraka is incoming. There have been some pitches for Taric. We’ve had difficulty nerfing Lulu mid a little without nerfing her support ability, but she doesn’t feel that far off either. (And to be clear, she’s fine in mid, so long as that doesn’t push out other mids or push Lulu out of support.) We see a lot of Leona. Janna can do things nobody else can do, so I bet we’re a tiny tweak away from her getting picked.

Caveat: I’m also talking a lot specifically about the NA finals here, because they just happened and I was fortunate enough to watch them live. The sample size is small and those guys, like everyone, have their own personal preferences. They tend to play conservatively (though it’s fun to watch when they don’t) because the price for failed experimentation is pretty high. I’m not sure it should be a goal that each game in a pro match has a different ADC and support from the previous one. (Which is not to say Nidalee getting banned or Trist getting pick/banned most games is the target either.)

Â Is this because of the discussion a few weeks ago when I said melee need love?Â

If we look at the NA finals (which certainly aren’t the only measure of balance but they’re fresh on my mind) we saw Corki, Jinx, Lucian, Kog and a whole lot of Trist. I may have forgotten one. Of those, Trist (and maybe Kog) are the ones we worry about being too dominant.

We think it’s safe to say that the ADC itemization tweaks from a few patches ago, while noble in their goal, ended up removing some of the weaknesses that Tristana had. I’m not sure what steps the live team will take to make sure Trist has some kind of weakness again, but when we last discussed it, we all agreed it was a problem. Interestingly, we see her used less in Korea so it will be fun to see how this all shakes out in worlds.

Again, LCS picks aren’t the only measure of champ power that we use, but we know they do heavily influence picks in normal ranked play.

Apologies for the derail, since the original topic wasn’t ADCs at all, but I wanted to share our thoughts on the issue. If you have feedback on the Cas or Soraka updates, we’ll make sure the respective designers see it.

Its Ghostcrawler. What did you expect, a rework that makes any sense?? Let me point you to the many ‘reworks’ we had in WoW… Oh ya, they all went just like this as well.

I don’t do champ updates and I don’t tell that team what to do, other than offer some higher level design direction. What I am interested in is the long term health of the game. So questions like “How do we position melee so they have a chance against ranged champions without just pumping up their passive stats?” is something I am involved in. So is making sure you guys have some insight into why we make the changes we do. More on that below.

Just a question, how do you explain the fact that since you’ve joined Riot ranged champions have been dominant over melees for the most part of your time being here?

Also since I have been here, Riot has updated SR and announced Worlds in Korea. I also can take close to zero credit for either of those decisions. If I were to secretly or overtly tell the designers that our mission is to make ranged dominant but shhh don’t let any players know of our plan, I’m pretty sure I’d be fired. This is a business, not any one developer’s private toy box.

Would you at least care to comment on why cassiopeia is being changed from the poison dot queen to just a ryze 2.0?

You’d be better off talking to the designer working on that update. IIRC the direction was to give her more of a late carry feel at the cost of some of her lane bullying potential, but I’m pretty sure nobody here wants to see a hyperscaling, CDR crazy snake Ryze.

I’m pretty sure at this point the respective designers (it’s Morello really for Soraka) don’t care about the issues the community has with the reworks.

Couple of things. Morello isn’t doing that update. He doesn’t do those either. He feels like he needs to comment because for so long he told players that we thought a true healer wasn’t healthy for League. We are trying it anyway with Soraka, so he wants to provide context for this apparent change of heart.

Second, we understand that champ updates aren’t likely to be greeted with universal acclaim. Some players like broken champs because they’re broken. Others want to see them fixed, but have a specific direction they’d like to see that is sometimes at odds with the direction we choose. We have been trying to articulate our thinking in patch notes, forecasts and rundowns to make that direction clear. Ultimately we do want players to feel like they have lots of options in who they play, and don’t want them to feel that a favorite champion is doomed to stay non-viable in competitive play. That’s a compass heading and not the kind of thing we can fix overnight. There are a lot of updates needed.

I think ranged champions are too dominant and I’d like to see melee bring more to the table than “I hit hard if I can ever close the gap.” I don’t think that’s a simple matter of just buffing melee stats, because then the seesaw just tips in the opposite way: ranged can never kill a melee until the latter is in their face, at which point the melee dumps out all their CDs and gets a kill. (It also makes melee vs melee duels pretty boring because they are both soaking a lot of damage.)

We want to rework fighters. It’s a big project and not the kind of thing you are going to see in a patch or two. I know that’s frustrating, but really our only options on large scope changes like this are to talk about them early (in which case it’s frustrating that you see no action for a long time) or we don’t talk about them (in which case it’s frustrating because you don’t know if we even acknowledge the problem or are formulating a solution). The option of “just fix everyone next patch” isn’t really an option.

It was something the design team as a whole wanted to do. The problem we were trying to fix was having such static, pre-determined build orders for ADCs. In retrospect you can argue that the change caused more overall harm to the game than good, but at the same time, if we’re super paranoid about making any change with long-term ramifications, it just means we’ll make fewer changes overall.

If anything, the ADC itemization changes (in 4.11 IIRC) illustrate how hard it is to touch one part of the game without touching everything else, which further complicates really big projects like a melee rework. We can try to make larger changes in preseason where players tend to be more understanding of disruption, but there are probably inevitably going to be times when we make a change for a good reason, but have to follow it up with a lot of other changes in subsequent patches.

What I did on WoW is get out on forums and twitter and talk to players. That is the only reason most players even know my name and not many of the other leads. I plan on still communicating though, hopefully even more so.

Here’s a link to the whole post; it’s a good read if you’re interested in an analysis of post-rework Sona.

Hey all, just wanted to hop in here and say that I have read this post and have been thinking about what next steps Sona needs or can support. Initial thoughts are that while Sona is slightly less successful, she’s still very much on the winning side, so justification for straight buffs is pretty weak.

Usability changes are still something I’m very much interested in attempting, but finding ones that don’t increase her power dramatically may take some extra time. I can’t commit to anything, but I did want to let everyone know that we’ve still been talking about Sona, and we do want to make sure she’s satisfying, even if she’s not in need of straight buffs.

To sort of simplify it a bit, Soraka has pretty much the same heal as Sona’s W but on a 2 second cooldown instead of a 10 second cd.

So both the overall sustain and the burst healing are more. This is where health cost comes in, we want her to have extreme healing power that she doesn’t just spam and has to think about when to use it and how.

The goal is to let armor and MR purchases still make Soraka tanky, but in the correct ways. For each point of armor and MR you have, each individual health point becomes a higher effective amount. The ways we don’t want Soraka to be tanky are in the short window of burst, because we feel that Soraka needs to be vulnerable if she’s allowed to spam low CD heals on her whole team.

We -do- want Soraka to be survivable over the long run of the fight however. This means that the health return she gets for landing Q restores similar amount of -effective- HP in the long term because you still have 80% of the mitigation as raw stats and 20% of the value as AP that is effecting the value of the heal. Does that make sense?Â

Defensive stats still make her scale defensively, but a lot of that defensive power comes from her health regen being stronger, and when she has resists each point of HP is “worth” more, causing the value of the health return to scale in two ways at once. This way we can adjust how much of her long term tankiness needs to be dependent on hitting Qs and how much should just be stats. If we find that the health return isn’t offsetting the lack of resists, we can simply increase how much AP she gets per point of resits. It’s already in her favor currently (each point of armor/MR is worth 20 gold and AP is worth 21.75 I believe).

This gets asked a lot so let me explain. As you get close to the 50% mark, you create a pretty binary situation where if the enemy doesn’t have the tools to burst you, you basically get to sustain your carry infinitely as your costs get lower. Additionally, it creates weird incentives about how much health you ideally want to have to be the most efficient. With the % current model, it’s actually way more efficient to keep your health low, but we don’t really want to *encourage* people to tank their health down for efficiency. ideally, you want to stay as healthy as possible all of the time.

Thanks for the question. We ARE working on revamping the store as well. The first target for the Unlock team will be the boost page. This is part of a larger effort where we’ve been getting feedback from players and diving into the overall design. In parallel with that the team has been working hard on improving the infrastructure. There is a lot we can do to improve the experience in the store!

Fair question, in this case I’d argue what’s good for one champ doesn’t suit another though. That’s because Sion’s kit update is a lot closer than Urgot’s. Urgot’s is sometime next year, and not at the start, at the very earliest. Sion’s also in a better spot effectiveness wise than Urgot was. His kit’s pretty disjointed, but it’s more feasible to be an effective team member as Sion at present than it was on pre 4.15 Urgot.Â